Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War confuses even the PS5

The launch of the PlayStation 5 naturally marked the launch of new titles, some of which also catered to the PS4 to maintain world peace. Cross-gen compatibility, while nice, does have some of its problems, especially when different versions of the same game exist for the different console generations. There is, for example, the somewhat confusing situation with Marvel's Spider-Man but the situation with Treyarch's and Raven's latest Call of Duty: Black Ops installment is both amusing and irritating as it seems to confuse the PS5 more than just players.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is available on both PS4 and PS5 but if you happen to own both consoles, you have the option to buy both versions in a single bundle. Because of the PS5's backward compatibility with PS4 games, however, it's perfectly possible to have both versions installed on the latest-gen console, which is where the PS5's confusion begins.

Buying the CoD: Black Ops Cold War from the PlayStation Store lets you choose which version to download and most PS5 owners will probably just download the PS5 version. You can download both, however, but the side-effect is that the game's launcher will default to launching the PS4 version on the PS5, not the PS5 version. That's easy enough to fix but still rather unexpected.

What's not easy to fix, however, is a download issue. If, by mistake or by intention, you downloaded the PS4 version only, you apparently can't download the PS5 version after the fact because of a queuing bug. The only fix, unfortunately, is to factory reset the PS5, which means redownloading or re-installing everything again from scratch.

These problems could have probably been avoidable with some user experience testing and polish, like launching the PS5 version by default since it's probably what PS5 owners would prefer to experience in the first place. The download bug might have been harder to come across prior to launch and hopefully, it's something that can be fixed on the remote side to save players the pain of doing a factory reset.